> I was waiting to hear confirmation and now that I have, I just wanted to share something really awesome!! The attached picture is of my dad Roy Morales from 1952 when he was in Lake Tahoe. It will be used in a Chevrolet commercial!! And this commercial will be aired during the World Series!! . . . please share this with everyone who you think would like to know. I think that this is quite amazing….after almost ten years of he being absent from us physically, he will be seen throughout the whole nation! Isn’t that just so incredibly cool? And as his 20-year old self….WOW!<

Uncle Roy’s photo goes by really quickly, but if you pause the commercial at the 0:04 seconds mark, you’ll see him, smiling broadly in this black and white photo. General Motors announced that the ads will air throughout the World Series and maybe even during the SuperBowl.

So how did Chevy get the photo? I had to ask Kathy. She told me that the photo was taken by one of Uncle Roy’s friends when they both worked at the Cal Neva club in Lake Tahoe in 1952. A resource company contacted their family after they found the photo in the Los Angeles Public Library’s collection. Ah, yes, the power of the coconut wire and the FANHS family again: in the mid 1990s, our FANHS-LA Chapter helped the brilliant photographer Carolyn Kozo Cole and my old UCLA classmate Sojin Kim gather Filipino community photos for their “Shades of L.A.” photo archive project. They collected 10,000 photos from many communities of color, setting up cameras in church basements and community centers, and then asked us volunteers to help catalogue and write down people’s memories. I was blessed to be able to sit down with Uncle Roy (and Uncle Sam Balucas) as they talked story about literally hundreds of photos. As my comadre Meg Thornton says, it was one of the FANHS-LA projects of which I am most proud. Many photos have made it as covers of books and now, commercials.

You can read more about our beloved Uncle Roy or donate to his Memorial Scholarship funds at UCLA and USC here:

As I have written before, I feel truly blessed to have been mentored by many of the pioneers in Filipino American Studies like Uncle Roy. Another photograph of him – singing with a Manong at one of our FANHS-LA events – hangs on my office wall, reminding me daily of his legacy of teaching and community service that we must all carry on to younger generations. Ironically, now, a Chevy ad with Buzz Lightyear’s voice is a reminder too, even for just a split second, as I sit here in Detroit, a few miles from the GM plant where Uncle Roy’s Chevy was probably made.